The effects of climate change on the ocean will have an impact on all economic activities at sea, including shipping, fishery, energy, coastal protection, sustainable environmental and ecosystem management, tourism and security. Therefore, there is a demand for timely delivery of high-quality operational oceanographic services and products to support planning over short and long timescales, as they are fundamental for safe performance of marine and maritime activities. Moreover, there is a critical need to inform society, ocean governance and decision making to support a future sustainable knowledge-based maritime economy. User needs for regular, near-real-time and quality-assured services require an operational approach across a wide range of societal benefit areas. This has triggered a new wave of marine knowledge innovation in order to fill the gaps and improve the quality and resolution of the services, e.g. seamless forecasting, an operational ecosystem approach and operational marine climate services.

This white paper addresses key scientific challenges and research priorities for the development of operational oceanography in Europe for the next 5–10 years. Knowledge gaps and deficiencies are identified in relation to common scientific challenges in four EuroGOOS knowledge areas: European ocean observations, modelling and forecasting technology, coastal operational oceanography, and operational ecology.

This study addresses the impact of coupling between wind wave and circulation models on the quality of coastal ocean predicting systems. This topic reflects the increased interest in operational oceanography to reduce prediction errors of state estimates at coastal scales. The improved skill of the coupled forecasts compared to the non-coupled ones, in particular during extreme events, justifies the further enhancements of coastal operational systems by including wind wave models.

This paper describes the marine data available from the Marine Centre, part of the Sentinel-3 Payload Data Ground Segment, located at the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
Descriptions include the scientific and operational feedback mechanisms on the performance of the services as well as practical information and user support mechanisms.

Multi-platform high-resolution observations in the Gulf of Finland in the summers of 2009–2012 revealed pronounced variability at the sub-mesoscale in the presence of mesoscale features, such as upwelling/downwelling events, fronts, and eddies. The analysis suggests that the sub-mesoscale processes could contribute considerably to the downscale energy cascade and play a major role in phytoplankton growth enhancement via vertical transport and re-stratification of the surface layer.

Copernicus operational services include ocean colour applications from medium-resolution polar-orbiting satellite sensors. The goal is to satisfy EU reporting on the quality of marine, coastal and inland waters, as well as to support climate, fisheries, environmental monitoring, and sediment transport applications. Ocean colour data from polar platforms, however, suffer from fractional coverage. This effort is in developing water turbidity services from Meteosat geostationary instruments.

The Sentinel-6 mission is proposed as a multi-partner programme to continue the Jason satellite altimeter data services beyond the Jason-2 and Jason-3 missions. The Sentinel-6 mission programme consists of two identical satellites flying in sequence to prolong the climate data record of sea level accumulated by the TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3 missions from 2020 to beyond 2030.

Several operational satellite chlorophyll a (CHL) in the Baltic Sea were tested at a regional scale. Comparison to an extensive in situ CHL dataset showed low linearity. Bias-corrected CHL annual cycles were computed. The Gulf of Bothnia displays a single CHL peak during spring. In Skagerrak and Kattegat, there is a small bloom in spring and a minimum in summer. In the central Baltic, CHL follows a dynamic of a mild spring bloom followed by a much stronger bloom in summer.

The Spanish Institute of Oceanography supports different operational programmes in order to observe and measure ocean characteristics. Their combination allows responses to ocean research activities and marine ecosystem management, as well as official agency requirements and industrial and main society demands. All these networks are linked to international initiatives, framed largely in supranational Earth observation sponsored by the United Nations and the European Union.

A combined methodology to estimate time and space variable shoreline risk levels from ships has been developed, integrating metocean forecasts and oil spill simulations with vessel tracking automatic identification systems (AIS) and coastal vulnerability indices. Results show the ability of the proposed methodology to estimate the risk properly sensitive to dynamic metocean conditions and oil transport behaviour, enhancing the maritime situational awareness and the decision support model.

The Met Office provides a range of services in the marine environment. To support these services, and to ensure they evolve to meet the demands of users and are based on the best available science, a number of scientific challenges need to be addressed. The paper summarises the key challenges, and highlights some priorities for the ocean monitoring and forecasting research group at the Met Office.

In this paper, we provide a detailed description of an integrated approach to ensure the acquisition of high-quality surface current data, which remains as a priority for HF radar operators and the research community. This work should be of interest to readers in the areas of operational oceanography and also to a broad community of end-users since HF radar technology has many practical applications, encompassing both commercial and research uses.

The IEO-RADMED monitoring program is already conducting many of the evaluations required under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MFSD) along the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The different aspects of the ecosystem that are regularly sampled under this monitoring program are the physical environment and the chemical and biological variables of the water column, together with the planktonic communities, biomass and structure.

Argo floats are one of the main components of the in situ observation network in the ocean. Nowadays, more than 3500 profiling floats are sampling the world ocean. In this study, they are used to characterize spatial scales of temperature and salinity variations from the surface down to 1500m. The scales appear to be anisotropic and vary from about 100km at high latitudes to 700km in the Indian and Pacific equatorial and tropical regions.